NIH awards $15 million to support development of 3-D human tissue models

This lung-on-a-chip serves as an accurate model of human lungs to test for drug safety and efficacy. Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard University Photo

More than 60 percent of investigational drugs fail in human clinical trials due to a lack of effectiveness, despite promising pre-clinical studies using cell and animal research models. To help combat this translational science problem, the National Institutes of Health announced 13 two-year awards totaling about $15 million per year, with FY18 funds subject to availability, to develop 3-D microphysiological system platforms that model human disease. The funding is for the first phase of a five-year program. These platforms, called “tissue chips,” support living cells and human tissues to mimic the complex biological functions of human organs and systems and provide a new way to test potential drug efficacy.

These Tissue Chip for Disease Modeling and Efficacy Testing awards may enable scientists to better understand disease mechanisms and predict more accurately how patients will respond to specific drugs. The support is made possible through NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences’ (NCATS) Tissue Chip for Drug Screening program, which leads this effort in collaboration with other NIH Institutes and Centers.

“The goal is for these tissue chips to provide more accurate platforms to understand diseases, and to be more predictive of the human response to drugs than current research models, thereby improving the success rate of candidate drugs in human clinical trials,” said NCATS Director Christopher P. Austin, M.D.

NCATS launched its Tissue Chip program in 2012 to lead the development of highly innovative microphysiological systems to study drug safety and toxicity in a faster, more effective way than current methods. The tissue chips can be integrated to form a human body-on-a-chip, enabling researchers to study investigational drugs and therapeutic agents across the entire body prior to human clinical trials. The new Tissue Chip awardees will study a wide range of common and rare diseases, from rheumatoid arthritis, kidney disease and human influenza A viral infection to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia and arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy.

In the second phase of the awards, researchers will partner with pharmaceutical companies to further evaluate the usefulness of validated disease models – those that accurately mimic disease biology – in assessing the effectiveness of candidate drugs.

In addition to NCATS, NIH Institutes and Centers funding the new awards include the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, National Institute for Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the NIH Office of Research on Women’s Health.

About the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS): NCATS conducts and supports research on the science and operation of translation — the process by which interventions to improve health are developed and implemented — to allow more treatments to get to more patients more quickly. For more information about how NCATS is improving health through smarter science, visit https://ncats.nih.gov.

About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation’s medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit http://www.nih.gov.